Tag Archives: on my mind

Post navigation

A few days ago on Twitter, a poet tweeted about searching through her poems to make sure she hadn’t already used the image she wanted to use in a new poem. Another poet responded that she often does the same.

My response: I will fight you.

I mean: I haven’t slept since.

Well, okay, I have, but only restlessly.

Let it be said that these are poets whose work I admire deeply. And yet… And yet… My response: horror.

Horror, because what if Bonnard had only painted Marthe in the bath once?

What if Diebenkorn had worried about repeating himself, and only painted a handful of Ocean Parks, rather than painting 150 (correction: according to this source it was 145) Ocean Parks over the course of eighteen years?

I mean—and now I’m getting really serious—what if Jack Gilbert had stopped writing about Gianna and Linda and Michiko and Pittsburgh for fear of being repetitive?

No thank you, my friends, no thank you.

There are images (and, I would add, subjects, and even colors, and probably other things, too) that belong to certain poets. They use, and reuse, and use again these images across and throughout the body of their work. Why? Because obsessions fuel art. Because images do more than simply describe or represent something in a novel way—they also haul up to the surface a particular emotional resonance. An image is a portal into a poet’s mind and interior world, and hopefully, into our own as well. And troubling a particular image over time, over time, over time, and more time—this is one of the things I love about reading and writing poetry.

So, no, we don’t want to close ourselves off to using new images. And we don’t want to read or write an image in the exact same wording and in the exact same situation every time across a body of work (although now that I think of it, I may not be entirely opposed to that either—I mean: think of the guts that would take). We don’t want to be lazy or unthinking. But yes, please, for all time to the obsessive return of a writer or artist to his/her/their foundational images.

Especially because the best images, returned to, reveal more of themselves to us each time we read or write.

Especially because we change and (we hope) grow and (we hope) become more capacious and complex beings—so that a spider to us in 1987 will be very different to us than a spider in 2021.

Even the same spider.

Here are some of the images I return and return to in my own writing: the roof, the fence, the rib, the stone. The birches. The hillside and its forever-willow. The ditch, the meadow, the snow. The wood thrush; the indigo bunting, it’s song about fire. The dune. The doorway and the window. Abandoning them would be like giving up my own, well, rib.

Why the rib? Because mine aches in times of grief or sorrow. Why the ditch, the hillside (which is also where the meadow was, ftr) and her willow? They were my best friends—places to see from without being seen. Good for watching storms blow in. Dappled, quiet, buggy, blown. Useful as a ditch / hillside / willow.

This is my favorite—as a Jane Austen character would say—prospect in my new house.

It’s part way down the stairs. This is and is not a metaphor.

The photos on the wall to the left are of my kiddos, at the First House, standing at the screen door, looking out. This is and is not a metaphor. These photos have adorned every entryway of every house since then (and if you’re just joining us, there have been many, too many).

The green light was my housewarming gift to myself. I call her Minerva and we have a quick conversation every morning when I go downstairs at 5AM to make my tea: Good morning. Good morning. Another day, another 70 cents on a man’s dollar. Yep. Let’s smash the Patriarchy. Yep.

Beyond that, the warmth of the living room, and my beloved books and bookshelves.

I am grateful for this view, for this house which I purchased ambivalently but with the intention of giving my kids a home for their last few years at home, for the relative peace it holds for me after some very difficult years. I am grateful for my kids and my books, for this lovely green light that makes magic when illuminated:

I’m grateful to be a poet and a writer, (though, lately, I have felt a long way off from poetry); for whatever kind attention my work has received in the world; mostly, for the quiet mornings at my desk, in lamplight, with the words of others:

______…something

is running across the field,______can you see it comingthrough the yellow grass, can you see it coming______from the windowpane,are you closing the shutters, do you think it’s rain? (—Dana Levin)

This year, I’m especially grateful for a teaching job I love, and for my colleagues, and my students, who, at this point in the semester, are stressed out and exhausted and coming to office hours with their final papers. Like them, I am going in early, skipping lunch, staying late (Unlike them, because I am older and wiser and, let’s face it, a mom, I am reminding everyone to eat and sleep; I am giving out chocolate and throat drops and Excedrin. I am saying, There’s a time to be perfect, and a time to be done.).

I never get through finals week without these words thrumming through me: In the evening we shall be examined on love. They are the words of St. John of the Cross, and the title of a poem by Thomas Centolella:

Life is hard, even easy lives. This semester, I have lived every day in the “blue of no more daily evasions.” It is not a gentle blue. I often feel like the student who doesn’t even recall signing up for the course who now must take her orals (See: single mother of three teenagers). And like the teacher wracking her brain to find “what unknown quantity / will balance the equation.”

I don’t know, and may never, but I hope it’s the small, heartfelt acts that balance things out after all: Waking early to read and (try to) write even just one word in my notebook. Making the kids a hot breakfast, packing their lunches, because I can, and here they are, hungry. Going in early, skipping lunch, staying late. Cherishing my family and friends. Calling my elected officials again. Writing about books I loved and learned from. Living my small, wingéd, provisional truths; saying them out loud regardless of whether anyone’s listening; abandoning them when they show themselves to have been faulty after all.

Instead it’s this: I’m grateful, my grades are in, my kids are well-fed, I have a gorgeous new red lipstick, I’ve kept my house reasonably clean. This semester, I tried; let’s all keep trying; in the evening we shall be examined on love.

[Hmmmm… the preview is not showing attribution for the art I’ve used here. Here it is: wikimedia]

I’ve been reading (re-reading) Mary Ruefle’s collected lectures in Madness, Rack, and Honey. This is because I want to be able to write essays that are as smart, well-crafted, labyrinthine, and aesthetically pleasing as her lectures are.

In “Someone Reading a Book” she writes:

There is a world that poets cannot seem to enter. It is the world everybody else lives in. And the only thing poets seem to have in common is their yearning to enter this world.

In the margin, I have scrawled: Maybe we write poems as bridges to the world. What I meant was: Maybe poets write poems in an attempt to bridge the distance between themselves and the world everybody else lives in. Maybe a poem is an attempt to enter that world.

I know that I often write out of a sense of bewilderment. The world bewilders me. My life bewilders me. Even my own mind bewilders me. Writing poems helps me to understand things, at least a little bit.

Maybe this desire to enter the world is the original wound. Who said it first—that all writing comes from a wound? Maybe Dorianne Laux?

Other times, I’m not so sure I want to enter the world everyone else lives in after all. Ellen Bryant Voigt:

Here is what the walls of my study look like these days. Thank you, critical thesis.

Dear Reader, I keep starting blog posts like this: I had not intended to be away quite so long. It is still true. I’m just trying to keep all the balls up in the air: my thesis work, my editorial work, motherhood, keeping people (reasonably) well-fed and the bathrooms (reasonably) clean. Laundry (insert deer-in-the-headlights look here). And lest we forget: the poems.

[Confession: I am really good about not forgetting the poems. They are always my first priority, and I work on them every day before doing anything else. This may be a character flaw, but it’s the character flaw that has saved my life.]

At any rate, I’m here to share a few things this cold, snowy Friday.

“to let the words write the words” One thing I want to share is this amazing essay, “Bewilderment,” by Fanny Howe. I’d printed it off a few weeks ago and finally sat down to read it. First a little background: up until several months ago, my process for writing a poem was to free-write whatever came into my head, often something off a line by another poet, and often, amidst writing, returning to that line, and then to shave the free-write down or mix it up or do whatever I needed to do to it to make it a poem. Lately, though, my process has undergone a big (and often, for me, bewildering) shift: Words and lines arrive from I know not where. I write them down. More words and lines arrive. I write them down. And so on until (sometimes) a poem is made. I’ve been thinking of it as the LISTEN & DICTATE process of writing poetry, a phrase which I came across in this interview.

But in this essay, Howe writes a description of her writing process which better describes my own. I never would have been able to articulate it—which is why we need the rock star poets of the world: so they can tell us what we’re doing—but it is exactly how my poems have been arriving and making themselves. Howe writes:

First I receive the impression of a time period as an experience of pure language, glimpses of actions, emotions and weathers. I jot down whatever comes through—in a rush of words. Then I begin to see what is being said and to see it as it unfolds, as if from afar and sometimes I actually stand at a distance from the words that are there. Spotting word-associations and what their sounds suggest and prove about the “point” of this emergent poem forces me to remove my body from the action; to let the words write the words. Letting the lines cohere on their own volition is crucial. Literally it is like watching someone else take form in the dark and I am weirdly disassociated from the action, an observer, a voyeur, though all the objects in the room, and the body, are familiar, are even “mine.”

An experience of pure language. To let the words write the words. Yes, please.

the poem wanders away from the demonstration Since the election, there have been many calls to many different kinds of action. On social media, in articles, and elsewhere, I’ve read several outright imperatives and a few gentle suggestions that our poems must now be political. That poetry that does not engage in the public sphere and advocate for change is a useless endeavor.

I disagree. I think the act of making art is, itself, political. Roethke: “Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It’s what everything else isn’t.” Lyn Hejinian: the poet must “undertake the preservation of otherness.”

I also think that poems are the very opposite of tools. Which is not to say that a poem can’t be political and can’t become a rallying cry for a movement—we know poems can do this—but it is the poems themselves that decide what they will be. It is the poem’s will, not our own.

The poem is by its nature and design easily distracted. It wanders away from the demonstration, the committee meeting, the courtroom, toward the lake or that intriguing, mysterious light over there. What is that light? It looks like something, I’m not sure what, I’m sorry to leave this very important conversation but I have to know.

He also argues:

The role of poetry in our time of crisis is the same as always: to preserve our minds and language, so we may be strong for whatever is to come. And also, to preserve the possibility of mutual understanding, not by arguing for it, but by demonstrating it.

I guess what I’m saying here, to myself as much as to any of you, is: keep writing your poems. If they are political, so be it. If they are about a pair of socks a friend knit for you, so be it. If they are about the moss growing on the garden bench despite the snow, so be it.

and in a departure from our usual Friday programming I am not going to share a poem today. Not because there aren’t one thousand poems I could share, but because these words from Franz Kafka seem to belong with the other words I’ve written here today. And because, in a way, they are a little poem in and of themselves:

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

I’m planning to try a little something new here moving forward. Which is: smaller, more frequent posts. We’ll see how that goes. Meanwhile, I’m wishing you warmth, comfort, and poems, yours and others’.

We have been to Portland (pilgrimage to Powell’s Books) and the Oregon coast (“Mom, look: Michigan sand!”). We have been back home to Michigan to see family (ate orchard-fresh cherries; found many Petoskey stones; pilgrimage to spirit dune; made s’mores with cousins; drank wine with Mom; “Let’s go tubing, Grandpa!”).

The photo above is from yesterday (have kids, at park). We rode our bikes to the park, and I gave thanks for forty-five minutes of reading time on a park bench in the shade beneath the redwoods, which, by the way, are looking mighty stressed in this drought.

I’ve always been grateful for the portability of poetry (slim volumes, easily concealed). It’s an art form we can take with us, whether reading or writing.

As for writing, there has been precious little (slept in again, damn!). But there are seasons.

Then, maybe, some long awaited time at my desk. And orthodontist appointments, and trips to the ballet studio, and grocery runs, and cross-country meets. And all that. And through it all, poetry is with me.

Retreat still life: corner of desk with pens, flameless candle, and totems

retreat v. (of an army) withdraw from confrontation with enemy forces -> move back or withdraw -> withdraw to a quiet or secluded place; n.1. an act of retreating -> a signal for a military force to withdraw; 2. a quiet or secluded place -> a period or place of seclusion for prayer and meditation; 3. a military musical ceremony carried out at sunset.

from the Latin re- “back” and trahere “to draw”

*

In this post, I wrote about having planned for silence. And although that very quiet, poetry-intensive week now seems a world away, and although I fight against the impulse to consider schedules and responsibilities as “enemy forces,” I thought I’d write a bit about what I learned by retreating.

1. I had no idea how tired I was (and my guess is that most of us have no idea how tired we are). Although early morning is typically my best time for creative work, I set no alarms. I slept 10 hours most nights, and learned that I am just as capable of writing poems at 9:00 a.m. as at 5:00 a.m.

2. I had no idea how productive I’d been this academic year. All year I’ve been telling myself, “I’m in a fallow period,” that my focus has been polishing the manuscript and beginning to send it out, not writing new poems. But actually I have written a lot new poems this year. I guess it took having the time and space to really spread out (literally and figuratively) for me to have a sense of what I’ve written this year.

3. It really does make a difference to have uninterrupted time. Given time and space, my imagination and intellect could really unfurl. I was not impeded by thoughts like: “Oh, shoot — I’ve got to get that prescription filled today” or “I’ve got to get the chicken out to thaw” or “30 more minutes till pick-up” (is it just me, or is it always 30 more minutes till pick-up?).

4. I could live on tea, wine, cheese, bread, fruit, and yogurt.

5. And poetry.

6. Okay, and the occasional cookie.

(7. Um, and also nibbles of dark chocolate here and there. One must sustain oneself).

While I was away, a friend sent me a quote from Kafka: “I need solitude for my writing; not ‘like a hermit’ — that wouldn’t be enough — but like a dead man.”

Let the people say, Amen.

So, note to self: Every time I go away by myself for writing purposes (a grand total of two times in my life), I am reminded of how important it is to go away by myself for writing purposes. My goal is to make a practice of planning for silence and solitude, to fold it into my life so that — for me and for my family — it becomes regular and unremarkable.

If you need solitude to do your life’s work, I encourage you to plan for it, too. Hermit, or dead man — whatever works for you.

In my little circle of beloveds — family, friends — there has been a lot of loss and suffering lately.

This morning I woke up headache-y, but needing a particular poem. I couldn’t remember its title, but knew it was by Thomas Lynch. I remembered reading it for the first time when a friend made a copy of a handout she’d received in a poetry class long enough ago that there was no hope of my having filed it electronically.

I remembered: there is a blue bowl in the poem. There is a tree.

I knew once the headache fog lifted, I would have to go out into the garage and paw through old files. I knew this could take me all day (or all week), but I needed that poem.

By some miracle I found it after about five minutes of searching. Thank you, Universe.

This poem reminds me of something a friend of blessed memory used to say: Yesterday is gone and tomorrow is not yet promised to us. Today is all we have.

And although it is hard — probably impossible — to live that way every day (I, for example, am thinking about how I must thaw the meat for tomorrow’s dinner), this poem is a good reminder of Today is all we have.

Here is:

*

A NOTE ON THE RAPTURE TO HIS TRUE LOVE by Thomas Lynch

A blue bowl on the table in the dining room
fills with sunlight. From a sunlit room
I watch my neighbor’s sugar maple turn
to shades of gold. It’s late September. Soon…
Soon as I’m able I intend to turn
to gold myself. Somewhere I’ve read that soon
they’ll have a formula for prime numbers
and once they do, the world’s supposed to end
the way my neighbor always said it would —
in fire. I bet we’ll all be given numbers
divisible by One and by themselves
and told to stand in line the way you would
for prime cuts at the butcher’s. In the end,
maybe it’s every man for himself.
Maybe it’s someone hollering All Hands On
Deck! Abandon Ship! Women and Children First!
Anyway, I’d like to get my hands on
you. I’d like to kiss your eyelids and make love
as if it were our last time, or the first,
or else the one and only form of love
divisible by which I yet remain myself.
Mary, folks are disappearing one by one.
They turn to gold and vanish like the leaves
of sugar maples. But we can save ourselves.
We’ll pick our own salvations, one by one,
from a blue bowl full of sunlight until none is left.

In August I started a low-residency MFA program. I seem to have glossed over this fact based on questions from a few readers, so sorry about that. Yes, it’s true, although I don’t plan on giving up my Emily Dickinson MFA — never, ever.

When I started the program, I made a promise to myself. The promise was: I will do my own work first.

By this I meant (and mean) that my first commitment is to my own creative work and to reading and studying anything and everything I need to to fuel my own creative work. This means — regardless of assigned readings and papers due — I first read and write in my usual generative process. The program work is a second priority.

Last week and weekend, when I finally had some time to spend on non-mothering-related tasks, there was a little voice in my ear saying how I should be doing my assigned reading, I should be taking notes so I can write my papers, which are due this week, etc., etc., etc.

I almost gave in to that voice. It was so sure of itself.

But then I reminded myself of my promise: I will do my own work first.

What happened instead of finishing my assigned reading and starting my papers is that I have three new poem drafts, and I finally broke out of a creative swamp I’d been dwelling in for several weeks.

I think it was Philip Pullman who said something along the lines of: I don’t know where the stories come from, but they come to my desk. And if I’m not there, they go away again.

That, my friends, is what would’ve happened to my poems if I had not been ready to catch them as they filtered down from the Magic Kingdom Where Poems Are Born. They would’ve gone away again, and I would’ve missed them.

I am so much happier to have my drafts and papers unfinished, than my papers finished and no drafts.

So, again I encourage you to do your own work first. The rest of the work isn’t going anywhere, but the poems just might be. Amen.

Hello, Reader. If you’re just coming back from the holidays, me too. Today was the kids’ first day back, and I spent a delicious day at the library doing research for a poem on ants, then wrote a poem about nightshade. As a po-friend said: That sounds perfectly normal.

Long time readers may recall that each year I choose a word for the year. Or, the way it actually works is a word chooses me.

I learned this practice from poet, essayist, artist, and life coach Molly Fisk. If you want to learn more about it, she writes about it in this article (but swears those are not her feet).

I like this practice for several reasons. First, it’s much gentler than resolutions which always seem to tend toward the punitive. At least in my little world. Second, it has a focusing effect. The word, once it has chosen you, will come nipping at your heels, or encircling you from behind, or appearing gently before your eyes at various moments. It will remind you of itself and its wisdom for your life. Another thing I love is that all your past words kind of stay with you. A year ends, but it’s not like your word for that year then abandons you. My words for the last three years — persist, tend, NO — they are still my steadfast companions as the year turns again.

This year the word that chose me is cloister.

To quote the Beach Boys: Help me, Rhonda.

I’ve tried rejecting words in the past but it never works, so, dear cloister, I accept you.

cloister: n. 1. a covered and typically colonnaded passage round an open court in a convent, monastery, college, or cathedral; 2. a convent or monastery –> (the cloister) monastic life. v. 1. seclude or shut up in a convent or monastery.

Although it’s tempting, I’m not going to run off and seclude myself in a convent. I’m going to remember that this word is from Latin claustrum “place shut in; enclosure; bar, bolt, means of shutting in” — and make for myself the time and seclusion that writing requires.

I’m going to think about the phrase “often colonnaded” (colonnade: a row of evenly spaced columns) which speaks to me of intention and planfulness.

I’m going to let the fact that cloisters were built around a courtyard — open space, light, air, sky — remind me that even in seclusion there must be room to move, breathe, play, watch the clouds go by.

I will live with cloister, fail to live with it, try again, fail better, rinse and repeat. It will stay with me, but gently.

Post navigation

Welcome to The Stanza

www.mollyspencer.com

Molly Spencer’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Copper Nickel, FIELD, Georgia Review, The Missouri Review online, New England Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, and other journals. Her critical writing has appeared at Colorado Review, Kenyon Review Online, The Rumpus, and Tupelo Quarterly. Her debut collection, If the house, is forthcoming from University of Wisconsin Press in fall 2019. A second collection, Relic and the Plum is forthcoming from SIU Press in fall 2020. She holds an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop, and is Poetry Editor at The Rumpus. Molly teaches at the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. Find her online at www.mollyspencer.com.

Follow The Stanza via Email

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.